4 TRAINING SAILORS FARTHEST INLAND BY WILLARD CONNELY F all the United States, Minnesota is remotest from an ocean. Yet the people of Minnesota and of adjacent States are as keenly inquisitive and solicitous about the workings of our navy as, for example, the civilians who live within sight or sound of a navy-yard. More fervid is this feeling, naturally, in war time. So it was with widespread rejoicing that the people welcomed bluejackets en masse in this section of the land. Had the navy men ascended the Mississippi on a battle cruiser they could not have been hailed more heartily. When the Government sanctioned the training of sailors at Dunwoody Industrial Institute, in Minneapolis, it drew forth from the citizens an outburst of latent loyalty. Thousands of those present were born overseas, thousands more there were whose parents were immigrants. And the affection of these loyalists grows as the eager jackies continue to make of the Flour City a port of missing seas. The students, learning scientifically to be craftsmen of proved skill, are recruited from every corner of the Nation, although a considerable proportion are also enrolled locally. All are detailed on their merits for concentrative instruction at the of the men could be rated and sent to sea in less time. radio man has been for years a railway telegrapher, he te only an acquaintance with radio theory and naval tacties. S larly with a quartermaster who has worked on airplanes, or v a gas-engine student who knows motor boats. Out of classes, however, two or three of the most adept have in retained in the capacity of assistant instructors, with hig rating and additional privileges. On the other hand, it has been found imperative to ex the time allotted for certain courses, notably the instruction: machinists' mates general, who are kept in Minneapolis ab eight months, until they can pass the qualifying examinas: for sea service. The most rapid promotion has fallen to the lot of the and steam engine jackies, especially to those who had h civilian experience in that branch. In pressing need of you: engineers to man the fast multiplying submarine chasers, Navy has opened a quick avenue for those with technical know edge to gain the desirable rating of chief machinist's mate Dunwoody, with its practical course in engine types, crani cases, valves, cooling and transmission systems, carburetion an: ELECTRICIANS-RADIO AT LABORATORY WORK. THESE MEN ALSO HAVE INSTRUCTION IN OPERATING PRACTICE, INTERNATIONAL CODE trade school. They are as typical of the country as a whole as Just another needless custom shattered by the war is the old Initially, courses of instruction were set at four months. ignition, has been the stepping-stone for such men to proceed to their four weeks' finishing work at the United States Naval Gas Engine School, Columbia University, where in the Mechan ical Engineering College the actual chaser mechanism has been installed for study. In like manner, hundreds of radio operators, having demonstrated their ability to receive ten to fifteen words per minute in the international code, have been transferred to the United States Naval Radio School at Harvard, there to be given a final touch and despatched to the fleets. Squads of blacksmiths, rated early on their skill, are also now at sea. Pleased with the broad scope of the work performed by this inland school, Surgeon-General Braisted, of the Navy, authorized a hospital training course for bluejackets in Minneapolis. Every four months a class of one hundred apprentices starts training in materia medica, therapeutics, physiology, anatomy, bacteriology, dentistry, bandaging, dietetics, nursing and ward management, minor surgery, first aid. The instruction is given near by at the University of Minnesota. Both the hospital corps school and naval aviation were brought to Minneapolis, after the other courses had started, by Ensign Colby Dodge, U. S. N., essentially a promoter, who a year ago was ordered to active duty, very active duty indeed, at this uncharted naval station so rich in potentialities. The apprentice bakers make four hundred loaves of bread for the general mess. Pies, cakes, and buns they also ly as the menu calls. In use are the newest scientific baking iances-blenders, mixers, kneaders-as employed in metroan bakeries of wholesale capacity. Of one of the advanced ents, a bluejacket who had won the post of assistant instrucI asked whether he expected to start a bakery of his own r the war. No," he replied; "but I'd like to buy an interest in a drug e. Do you know anything about drugs?" I'm learning. That's the reason I am willing to stay on here in instructor, instead of going to sea with the rest. We get v only the chemistry of baking, but later I'll have a chance to rk in the laboratory by myself and study general chemistry." Like this boy, a great many of the apprentices at Dunwoody › looking to the future, investigating the indirect opportunis through which the Navy can help them to their preferred rk. It may be asked where they would get the money to enter siness for themselves. One of the chief petty officers, who was charge of three hundred bluejackets at their lodgings, shed me light on this point. "You would be surprised to see how many of the boys are lting down their pay," he said. "There's simply nothing to Not a few college graduates are in the detachment, though there are many more of these thousand men who have never entered high school. This disparity in education, however, balances a parallel inequality concerning actual experience in a trade. How these two types of men are dealt with was well illustrated by one of the instructors in engineering. "Whenever a bluejacket begins to tell me how long he has worked in a garage," this instructor explained," then I know he's a camoufleur. And if a college man in a sailor's uniform calls me aside after class, leads me into a room where he has two blackboards full of figures, and argues for half an hour on some theoretical point about circuits or pressure, then I know he needs pruning. Both lack a practical grasp of the fundamentals." While civilian instructors answer for the deportment of the men during class hours, while they mark each naval student on conduct as well as on theory, shop work, and log-book, the discipline of the jackies is largely administered by chief petty officers, older men whose service in the Navy ranges from ten to twenty-five years. These chiefs, under direction of com.nissioned officers, muster the men and drill them with rifles, for, however expertly trained in a handicraft a bluejacket may be, he is never allowed to forget that he may have a chance to use a bayonet. Ship etiquette and ship terms are thus fixed in the minds of THESE CARPENTERS AT DUNWOODY IN THREE MONTHS PROGRESSED FROM THE RUDIMENTS OF THEIR CRAFT TO THE BUILDING OF MOTOR BOATS spend it for. Few of them have dependents. When the men bave liberty, they are entertained by new-made friends around town." "Don't they go in for amusements at night?" "No; they stay in their rooms to study, read, or write up their log-books. By then it's time to go to bed, for reveille sounds at half-past five in the morning. "And are they never homesick?" 66 99 He shook his head. They don't have time for that," he explained. From his pay during a four-year enlistment, with food and clothes supplied, a bluejacket can easily lay aside a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars. Upon re-enlisting this amount can be doubled, or more than doubled if the sailor obtains a higher rating. The general scheme of training at these schools is productive rather than experimental. Exercises in which the disposition of the material used is "scrap" are reduced to a minimum. In other words, if bluejackets were learning to be ship's carpenters they could at any time stock a small furniture store with their manufactures, or the coppersmiths could fill a hardware shop. "And the curious part of it is," said one of the instructors, "enlisted men who have had only four or five years' schooling seem to learn mathematics as quickly as those who have gone through the eighth or tenth grade. Such a condition would indicate, I think, that the public schools might boil down their curriculum." these novices before they ever see the ocean. At the weekly inspection of the battalion by the commandant the chiefs are also present to note sharply any discrepancies or irregularities. But to anchor thirteen hundred miles from an ocean and still serve the Navy adds an anomalous chapter to the lives of these old tars, oddly marooned. Their ships set them ashore, then sailed away. On top of that insult the railways next carried them as far inshore as it was possible to go. Yet these unrepining "C. P. O.'s" do not seem to despise the return of their long-lost land-legs. In the basement of the main building at Dunwoody is the general mess, prepared thrice daily in the galley by apprentice cooks. These cooks and future commissary stewards have classroom work too, like their mates in every other course. They study food values, navy ration, menus, meat cutting, sanitation, landing parties. But the part of hourly interest to all is the mess, served by the cafeteria plan. The critical old chief petty officers need not patronize the general mess, though some of them do. 66 Ah," sighed one, scrutinizing his meat pie," this food isn't much like the stuff we used to get aboard ship." "Why not?" he was asked. "Landlubbers' mess-inexperienced cooks here," was his reason. "Yes," he was told; "but isn't the food intended for inexperienced sailors?" BY WILLIAM E. BROOKS My heart a garden is, a garden walled; But there are shaded walks far from the gates, With tenderness,-lest I grow utter cold "Tis then I thank my God for those high walls That friends I love may share the quiet shade. ARTHUR MCQUAID, AMERICAN' FROM EVERY STORMY WIND THAT BLOWS BY HERMAN SCHNEIDER Arthur McQuaid "sairved the Lord," as he would have phrased it, as a cobbler in a Pennsylvania mining town. Physically and me tally he was outstanding; he radiated a lasting impression of a jovial man of strong convictions. His controlling passions were the desti of the United States and a personal God to whom he could talk about daily affairs. He rarely argued or defined these, but he lived the every day. He phrased his thoughts in archaic form as a result of reading the Bible and Matthew Henry's "Commentaries" daily while ba worked. The first Arthur McQuaid story appeared in The Outlook May 23, 1917; the second, August 22, 1917; and the third, January 23, 1918 THE weather reports which Robert McAndrew used were T written in the clouds and the air and the direction of the wind. These foretold a blizzard, and, as supervisor of the township roads, Robert was laboriously preparing for it, in the heavy, methodical, painstaking way of a conscientious giant, by clearing from the culverts and the ditches the slush of a January thaw. In the early afternoon one of his boots began to leak, and at five o'clock, with the thermometer already away below the freezing-point and the snow whipping in whirlwinds about every obstruction, he bent his way in the darkness to Arthur McQuaid's. Arthur's big black, shaggy dog, McTague, frisking in high spirits up and down the road and leaping in the air to bite at the flood of flakes, spied him coming, and together man and dog tumbled into the shoemaker's shop in a swirl of snow and frosty air. Arthur was pegging cheerily by the light of a kerosene lamp and singing lustily the last verse of the hymn "From every stormy wind that blows." His red flannel shirt and the lively color-play of the fire, which the half-open door of the stove revealed, marked the only bright spots in the room; for Arthur's thick body and big round head threw the rest of the tidy shop into deep shadow. "Ah, 'tis you, Robert," he said, when the verse was finished. "There, there, McTague, will ye no lairn to shake yerself before ye come in? But he's like meself, Robert; he fills with gladness when the Lord passes by in majesty and power. 'Twill be a grand night for prayer-meetin'. Did ye get all the ditches cleared?" 66 Aye," said Robert, slowly, from the stove, taking off the leaking boot. "They're all trim. There's a cut in me boot, Arthur, and I'll be out airly in the mornin' to clear the drifts. Have ye time to mend it?" "I have that," Arthur affirmed. "There's no boots I'd sooner mend, for ye're what I'd call a good and faithful sairvant, Robert. Ye're a credit to auld County Down and to the township. Let's have a look at it." He examined the cut carefully under the lamp, while Robert told in labored detail exactly how it happened. A conscientious search uncovered the best piece of leather in the stock, and Arthur set to work while Robert drew comfortably up to the stove. Copyright 1918 by Herman Schneider. "Have ye ever thought," Arthur asked, "how yer ald father, smokin' his pipe, would have nodded his head in proper pride could he have known ye'd been elected three times super visor of the township roads?" Robert was accustomed to weighing his words, but his silence was longer than usual. "Ye hit it there," he replied. ""Tis the honor. Ye're wel aware, Arthur McQuaid, I'm no hand for wairds. I was elected to fix the roads, and fix the roads I have. 'Twas not only a duty, ye'll mind, 'twas the honor of it." He paused a moment. "And now they're goin' to take it away from me." Arthur straightened and turned with such a jerk that McTague barked. "Who's goin' to take it from ye?" "This night." "Where?" "There's a meetin' in the hall back of Sam Davis's saloon." "Are ye no goin'?" Robert raised his eyes in amazement and reproach. "Man, 'tis prayer-meetin' night." "Aye," said Arthur, "and a fine one. The Lord God's abroad this night. D'ye hear that now?" The wind and snow swept down the street in absolute possession. He turned to his work, and neither of them spoke until the boot was mended. But the more vigorous motion back and forth of Arthur's sinewy arms betokened a rising spirit. "There now, Robert "-the shoemaker's voice was charged with the vigor of righteous wrath-" put yer boot on, and we'll read the Fifty-ninth Psalm." The same swelling tide of resentment animated his steady stride against the storm to the Wednesday night prayer. meeting, and some of it found vent in occasional crisp sentences to McTague, who trotted along. "The Egyptians were sorely smitten with plagues, laddie, but they were spared a meddlin' lawyer. 'Twas a peaceful town till Joshua Gill's son came back from school filled with a knowledge of the crimes of all time. 'Tis a sorry sort o' lairnin' for a frame already frail. ... Not but what there was honest difference, man to man, and dishonest deeds; but the dominie and Father Nolan made all fair and friendly. . . . .. Ah, McTague, ye winced at that blast!... Aye, Father, I often think ye go out in the roar of a great storm to This unusual photograph from the war zone shows a group of French children watching American soldiers draw a gun into firing position. The impressions that these youthful representatives of France are receiving to-day as to America's love for them and their country will no doubt bear abundant fruit in strengthened friendship between France and America to-morrow CZECHOSLAVS IN VLADIVOSTOK ON THEIR WAY TO HELP THE ALLIES The appearance of these soldiers in Vladivostok is said to have roused great enthusiasm there--a welcome indication that the Siberian Russians are still loyal to the Allies. These Czechoslavs, it is reported, are planning to get to the battle-line on the western front. Their energy and determination are worthy of the highest praise |